The crowd at Saint Vitus on Friday night at first seemed recessive, ice-weary, a little off.
It wasn’t moving. Normally a hardcore show deals with passivity pretty quickly: volume plus speed plus aggression equals breakthrough. As for this one — a quadruple bill ending with the fairly new bands Sick Feeling, from Brooklyn, and Obliterations, from Los Angeles — the breakthrough came late, if it ever came at all.
Hardcore punk has been around long enough to have become what music-business promoters and publicists call heritage music. It’s been codified and historicized: for instance, in a great new oral-history book by Tony Rettman, “NYHC,” about the beginnings of New York hardcore in the 1980s. The book recounts stories and reprints gig fliers from events that seemed at the time to be unattended by anyone with any influence over the historical record.
But hardcore’s heritage status also means that a new band doesn’t have to give it full credence as a channel of hope and protest and rebellion. It can be messed with, treated like a given, made conceptual, turned upside-down for effect. Some of both was happening on Friday: incursions into hardcore and historical re-enactments of it. No wonder members of the crowd thought twice before they moved.
Sick Feeling seems like two bands at once. One is shouting and riff-based and straightforward; one is discursive, ghostly, out to lunch. It has just released its first record, “Suburban Myth” (Terrible). When you look at some of its songs on a Soundcloud page, rendered in wave forms, you see clear-cuttings amid the orange forest of volume: stretches of weird, hard-right-turn, lower-volume activity amid the conventional hardcore.
In a live set, those are the parts when the drummer Alan Yuch suddenly leaves his cymbals alone or stops playing altogether, the guitarist Don DeVore moves over to electronic loops and synthesizer tones, and the singer Jesse Miller-Gordon starts muttering or raving, pacing and shaking, swallowing his words. (He has a good enraged yell, but his singing has little body; he can seem like a placeholder for someone else.) On Friday, the songs were short, and the pauses were awkward. Repeatedly the action surged, then dropped. This is a band that uses dramatic contrast the way most hardcore bands use roars and chants. This is a band that wants you to think about imminent failure.
Obliterations make you only think about success, in terms of how powerfully they use conventions of hardcore. Speed? “Mind Ain’t Right.” Swing? “Can’t Afford to Die.” Droning repetition? “Shame.” Simple, centralized minor-key riffs? “The Narcissist.” The singer Sam James Velde knows what he’s putting you in mind of: he blows out guttural phrases and rounds his screamed vowels like a cross between Black Flag’s third and fourth singers, Dez Cadena and Henry Rollins. You can listen to Obliterations’ deeply satisfying new album, “Poison Everything” (Southern Lord), and feel that these are people who were born to do this alone.
In truth it’s a band of people who have been in other rock bands that sound like other rock bands, none of them hardcore per se: Black Mountain, Bluebird, Night Horse, Pink Mountaintops, Saviours. It’s a skillful party of record collectors and classicists. It’s hardcore played by fancy at least as much as by need. On Friday you had to remember what you were there for — the insured power, the calibrated impact. At first it was a struggle: the sound system was reducing that power by half.
Mr. Velde’s voice strained to be heard. The drums sounded small, and the swing wasn’t quite happening. It took 15 minutes before the breakthrough came, on “Black Out” — “My conclusion, the only solution, is to black you out!” — and the audience woke up, formed a mosh-pit, and engaged in the historical process of charging and shoving.
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